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As Scandal Flared, BBC’s Leaders Missed Red Flags

LONDON — Last March, Mark Thompson addressed the Royal Television Society and took proud stock of his time leading the BBC, Britain’s publicly financed media behemoth that is both treasure and target. He had successfully navigated eight years of political wrangling, the digital revolution, controversies over cost-cutting and his own pay, not to mention some cringe-making televised antics of BBC hosts.

Anticipating coverage of the London Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee over the summer as the crowning jewel of his tenure, he recounted the BBC’s considerable achievements on his watch and declared: “Trust in the BBC is also at an all-time high.”

He explained why. “When things go wrong at the BBC, the public can hear us admit it and can see us striving to put things right,” he said, adding, “the modern BBC does everything possible to report on itself objectively.”

Eight months later, trust in the BBC has plummeted because of a scandal set off in part by the network’s decision to halt a reporting project on decades-old accusations of child sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, the network’s longtime host of children’s and pop music shows.

Controversy over the canceled investigation was already brewing when Mr. Thompson addressed the television society. It fully erupted in early October, just after he left and began preparing for his new job as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.

The events have cast a shadow over his tenure at the BBC and have forced his new boss, the Times publisher and board chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., to defend him even before he starts work on Nov. 12.

Mr. Thompson has said he knew nothing of the Savile investigation before it was canceled by the editor of the BBC’s “Newsnight” program. As for what he knew afterward, his statements have evolved: He first said he was unaware of the investigation, but then acknowledged he was subsequently told of its cancellation by a reporter at a cocktail party. He said while he “may have formed an impression” about possible areas of a Savile investigation, including his charity work, he was unaware of child-sexual-abuse accusations.

Interviews with former BBC executives and officials here in London show that in the months after the investigation was canceled, Mr. Thompson and his top executives repeatedly missed opportunities to pursue a fuller picture of the “Newsnight” reporting, the fate of the program and, perhaps, of Mr. Savile.

In the two months after the inquiry’s cancellation, seven reports appeared in the British press about the scuttled investigation and the accusations against the longhaired, cigar-chomping Mr. Savile, who died last year at age 84. The headline in The Daily Mail Online read: “BBC axes exposé into Jimmy Savile teen sex allegations.”

According to former executives, at least some of those articles were part of a packet of press clippings sent each morning to the network’s top executives. Mr. Thompson’s daily 9:15 a.m. conference call with his top executives often included discussions from the clippings file.

Whether through a series of near misses or a more deliberate avoidance, the executives failed to confront questions about Mr. Savile and the possibility that, in decades past, the BBC was somehow complicit in his behavior.

Beyond reverberating at the BBC, the broadcast last month of a documentary by a rival network led to a police investigation of hundreds of accusations that, primarily during the 1970s, Mr. Savile abused teenage girls and some boys at schools and hospitals where he performed charity work and, in some cases, on BBC premises.

Mr. Thompson, 55, said in an interview last week that when he eventually heard the accusations this fall he felt “that mixture of shock and sadness.”

Mr. Thompson, who as the BBC’s director general was both chief executive and editor in chief, partly attributes his lack of knowledge about the “Newsnight” inquiry to the BBC’s enormous size. In fact, its 23,000 employees provide news and entertainment across eight television channels, 50 radio stations, a Web site and a host of other outlets — all with their own chains of command.

But after he learned of the scuttled investigation late last December, he said he raised it with his news chiefs, who told him that the editor of “Newsnight” stopped it for journalistic reasons. “I wasn’t told any specific lines of inquiry and certainly not anything related to the BBC,” he said, adding that amid the flood of business, he was willing to be assured there was nothing to worry about.

“It didn’t occur to me that there was a contemporary corporate interest to defend,” Mr. Thompson said. “You can say it’s a lack of imagination.” But he pointed out that Mr. Savile’s heyday was decades ago — he retired in the mid-1990s — and that his association with him was watching him on television as a child.

Elevated Amid Scandal

Mr. Thompson came to the top BBC job by way of scandal.

The previous director general resigned in 2004, after a controversy over a BBC report concerning accusations that British authorities had “sexed up” intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Thompson was a natural choice as successor, having spent most of his career rising through the BBC ranks after arriving from Oxford as part of a highly selective trainee program.

“He was one of the Brahmin class at the BBC that they usually got from Oxford and Cambridge,” said Steve Hewlett, a former BBC journalist who worked with Mr. Thompson.

By age 30, he was the editor of the main evening news and two years later was named head of the investigative show “Panorama.” He eventually became director of all nonnews television, overseeing a panoply of cultural and entertainment programming.

When he became director general, said Mr. Hewlett, “so much had to be done to right the ship and he did it brilliantly.”

Photo

Over his eight years leading the BBC, Mark Thompson navigated political wrangling, the digital revolution and a number of smaller controversies.Credit
Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

While Mr. Thompson has been criticized in the Savile case, after other programming controversies flared, he had ordered internal inquiries, fired people, tightened policies and instituted training on ethics and standards.

The vast array of BBC outlets delivered a full complement of on-air problems: the “Queensgate” scandal in which doctored footage made it appear that Queen Elizabeth was storming out of a photo session; a 2008 episode in which a comedian and host left a lewd message on an actor’s phone; a discovery of irregularities in call-in competitions on several shows, including for the naming of a cat on the show “Blue Peter.”

“Letting down the children who watch ‘Blue Peter’ and who trust it implicitly is a truly terrible idea — even if all that is at stake is the difference between calling a cat ‘Cookie’ or ‘Socks,’ ” he wrote in a companywide message, adding, “the simple fact is that the public expect the highest possible standards of us.”

One of Mr. Thompson’s signature accomplishments was helping transform the BBC for the Internet era — experience that made him attractive to The Times. In a speech to a press association in Brazil last month, Mr. Sulzberger praised his new hire: “When Mark joins us next month, he will bring with him a track record of success in a truly global organization in the digital age.”

Beyond the BBC’s heavily trafficked Web site, Mr. Thompson headed the production of the enormously successful BBC iPlayer, which offers television and radio content on demand.

One thorny issue for Mr. Thompson was the revelation in financial disclosures that at least 37 BBC employees were earning more than the prime minister. Mr. Thompson’s salary and benefits reached as high as $1.3 million — six times the prime minister’s pay.

Mr. Thompson defended his policies to Parliament, saying that the BBC needed to be competitive with private companies and that by 2010 he had cut 100 of the network’s 700 senior managers, with more to come. He also cut executive pensions and his own pay fell to about $1 million in his final year.

The executive pay issue hardly enhanced his image among the BBC’s rank and file, many of whom were angered by a deal he cut with the government to keep a steady stream of public license fees flowing to the BBC. The National Union of Journalists objected because the deal led to reduced programming money and another round of job losses.

It did not help that Mr. Thompson was “not a sort of warm and cuddly person,” as one former executive put it.

But the executive said he had a “very, very good strategic brain and has the ability to deal with a crisis in an unflappable way.” And several people who know him said that while his quick intellect and self-confidence might have sometimes come across as argumentative, he used it to defend the BBC.

Andrew Graystone, the director of the Church and Media Network, recalled that Mr. Thompson, a practicing Catholic, appeared at his group soon after the BBC drew protests for broadcasting “Jerry Springer — The Opera,” a blasphemous comedy featuring Jesus, Mary and God as guests on the Springer show.

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“I remember someone saying to him ‘50,000 Christians have asked you not to air this. How many people have to write to you before you pull a program off the air?’ ” Mr. Graystone recounted. “He said, ‘One. But they have to be right.’ ”

After the BBC

For the moment, the Savile case has shaken the solid reputation Mr. Thompson had when he left the BBC on Sept. 14.

He said he first learned details of the Savile case several days later when he was vacationing in Italy and his former spokesman called to tell him about articles previewing the Oct. 3 Savile documentary on the rival network.

But some of those same details had been known to a group of Mr. Thompson’s employees for more than a year. “Newsnight” reporters had begun investigating Mr. Savile days after he died. After hearing accusations for some time, they waited until Mr. Savile’s death because Britain’s strict libel laws would no longer apply, making it more likely that victims might talk, according to BBC employees familiar with the case.

Exactly how far along and substantiated the “Newsnight” reporting was when it was halted is likely to be central to an independent inquiry now under way at the BBC, and a key to understanding who may have acted improperly. But the BBC employees familiar with the case say that reporters had filmed one victim telling her story, had plans to film a second and had others giving their accounts off camera.

At the same time “Newsnight” was pursuing its project, the BBC’s nonnews television division was preparing elaborate tributes to Mr. Savile, scheduled to run over Christmas.

It was not for lack of opportunity. His 9:15 a.m. daily conference call, which focused on corporate issues, included the heads of news and television, the two executives involved in the conflicting Savile projects. Mr. Thompson also led management board meetings of top executives once or twice a month and one item distributed to that group was the “Pan-BBC Managed Programme Risk List” of sensitive reporting projects in the works. Paul Mylrea, a BBC spokesman, said on Friday that the Savile inquiry was not included.

If Mr. Thompson was not informed, it is partly because of strict programming divisions within the BBC, a point illustrated in recent Parliamentary testimony by George Entwistle, the current director general.

Mr. Entwistle, who was previously head of nonnews television programming, said that before the “Newsnight” effort was halted, Helen Boaden, the head of news, told him of the investigation, saying it might force him to rearrange the Christmas schedule and the Savile tributes.

Photo

Seven reports, including The Daily Mail’s, appeared in the British press about the scuttled BBC investigation into Jimmy Savile, who died last year.Credit
Mail Online

He said that the conversation, which occurred at a Women in Film and Television lunch, was brief and that he did not ask the nature of the investigation. “I didn’t reflect on it,” he said. “This was a busy lunch.”

He said his respect for the independence of the news division accounted for “my determination not to show undue interest.”

His explanation why none of this had reached Mr. Thompson suggested an almost ritualized BBC bureaucracy.

Mr. Entwistle said that while the director general had “responsibility and accountability” for programming, control lay with program editors, who report to managers and ultimately to division directors. Given the volume of programming, only the rarest program issue reaches the director general.

An incredulous member of Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport committee, Damian Collins, said “if this doesn’t qualify, you wonder what the bar is.”

He asked, “Would not a program being made by one of the BBC’s flagship news programs bringing forth very serious criminal allegations about someone who was an icon for children in this country, created as an icon by the BBC for very vulnerable people as a result of his celebrated BBC status, would the creation of a program like that or even the preparation for broadcast of a program like that not routinely have gone to the editor in chief?”

The investigation was canceled in mid-December by the “Newsnight” editor, Peter Rippon. Mr. Thompson has said he learned of it only when a BBC reporter, Caroline Hawley, approached him at a party and asked why the Savile inquiry had been killed. She said in a statement that she gathered from his reaction that he knew nothing about it.

When news executives then told him it was abandoned “for journalistic reasons,” Mr. Thompson said in the interview, “I got no sense they themselves were holding anything back, and there was nothing to discuss.”

So when articles began appearing in the daily “cuttings,” BBC executives either did not notice or assumed there was not a problem.

Mr. Thompson said he did not read all of the clippings and did not remember seeing those about Mr. Savile among the packets, which sometimes ran over 100 pages.

Some executives noticed. “You’d get the cuttings related to the BBC every day and there was the story about ‘Newsnight,’ ” said Caroline Thomson, the former chief operating officer who worked for Mr. Thompson.

Ms. Thomson, who participated in the director general’s morning conference call, said “it must have been raised in that phone call,” but she does not remember a specific discussion or ever discussing it with Mr. Thompson.

Ms. Thomson said that, at the time, it did not seem particularly significant that rumors persisted about Mr. Savile or that the BBC, like other media outlets before it, could not confirm them. “It wasn’t surprising that the story hadn’t stood up because no one had written it before,” she said, adding that “there was always a sense that he was a bit weird.”

In retrospect, Ms. Thomson said, “no one quite thought of it as a story about the BBC.” Or apparently imagined the scope of the abuse accusations.

“I look back now and say, ‘Why didn’t I think it was a problem?’ ” she said. “But I didn’t.”

Coming to The Times

In April, with The Times looking for a new chief, Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Thompson met for drinks at the St. Pancras hotel in London. Mr. Thompson wrote an eight-page essay about his ideas for The Times, and just before the Olympics began in late July, flew to New York for interviews with the Times directors.

A background check was performed and, said one Times executive, “he was clean.” Apparently, no reference to the Savile case emerged.

That came in early October, in the form of screeching headlines in London. Asked about it by reporters on Oct. 13, Mr. Thompson released a statement saying: “I was not notified or briefed about the ‘Newsnight’ investigation, nor was I involved in any way in the decision not to complete and air the investigation.” He added, “During my time as director general of the BBC, I never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile.”

Several days later, after news reports about his cocktail party conversation, he wrote a fuller explanation in response to questions from Parliament, acknowledging the conversation and his subsequent questions to news executives.

Mr. Thompson, who is due to report to work next Monday in New York, insists his version of events has not changed. “I honestly believe I did nothing wrong,” he said.

Two weeks ago, with tentacles of the Savile scandal touching The Times, Mr. Sulzberger wrote in a statement to employees that he was convinced that Mr. Thompson had nothing to do with killing the ‘Newsnight’ investigation and that he “possesses high ethical standards and is the ideal person to lead our company.”

Christine Haughney contributed reporting from New York and Lark Turner contributed research from London.

A version of this article appears in print on November 5, 2012, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Scandal Flared, BBC’s Leaders Missed Red Flags. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe